Its struggling electronic book business is now losing almost as much money — just shy of half a billion dollars in the last fiscal year — as its physical book retailing business is making in profit. But this year Barnes & Noble has a distinctly physical problem.

The company is slashing costs in its Nook e-book unit, and yesterday said it would stop making its own tablet computers as another cost-saving measure. And while the bricks-and-mortar retailing business is doing relatively well, Barnes & Noble told analysts yesterday that it will struggle to grow like it did last year.

Why? There are a few reasons, but one stands out:

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In the most recent quarter, retail sales in the bookstores — excluding Nook e-readers and the like — were down 5.8% on the year prior. The company singled out Fifty Shades of Grey and The Hunger Games — two smash hits of 2012 — to explain why, saying the huge popularity of both series’ has not been repeated by an equivalent hit this year.

“Just maybe to provide a little more color on the impact of Fifty Shades, it was worth 4 to 5 points of comp for us last year,” Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch said on an analyst call yesterday, referring to comparable store sales growth. ”It was that big a book,”

The company expects retail store sales to decline in “high single digits,” for the current financial year, citing both the long-term troubles of the bookselling business and the fact that 50 Shades made last year’s numbers difficult to match.

So could another blockbuster series get customers flowing back into bookstores? In a 2012 call, citing examples like Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” series and others, Mr. Lynch said he expects there to be more superstar book trilogies coming in the future.

“If you look back at Harry Potter, let’s take that as an example, we’ve seen Fifty Shades before,” he said. “This isn’t an anomaly”

Comments (1 of 1)

Actually, it's not that they can't, it's that they won't. Apparently their parents and teachers never read to them when they were children and helped them discover the joy of reading--and learning. How do I know? I'm a college professor (economics), and I can assure you that their acquaintance with the English language is extremely limited. Furthermore, many write like they text. And, sadly, they text like they think, and their thought patterns have little organization, because they haven't read stories and books that would have helped them learn to organize their thinking. To be sure, there are still a number of young people who read and write in the ways that once were commonplace. Their share of the total continually shrinks, however. The world is going the way that C.S. Lewis predicted decades ago (and, no, I am not making a religious statement here--he had a lot more to say about human and social trends than his religious commentary). In any event, I do not plan to purchase stock in Barnes and Noble, which already is admitting it depends on semi-pornographic scribblings for its livelihood. It also has been dependent on my family and me, but as a related article in today's WSJ notes, increasingly it is difficult to find a decent selection of books at the typical Barnes and Noble outlet. The shelves are full of the paranormal romance and semi-pornographic series, though, which the minds of semi-literate youths being "taught" by today's parents and public schools apparently can handle.